alyaza [they/she] @ alyaza @beehaw.org

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people.

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If the probability of success of those actions was not 0%, there may be an argument that the impact outweighs the unlikelihood of success. But you and I both know otherwise.

i mean i just don't find this argument particularly convincing. i think biting this bullet would improperly impugn the vast majority of protests and forms of protest—because most of them are unsuccessful and will never be successful. likewise, i think "chance of influencing an outcome for the better" is just one variable you should consider in a moral act, because trying to weigh whether you should do something or not on that basis just invites a whole host of other problems.

If I attempt to destroy the government , I will be killed. If I don’t pay taxes, I will go to prison. If I don’t vote for Biden, I won’t.

i guess i'm sort of obliged to ask: why are these undesirable outcomes if your moral system is just? i find this a weird objection to make unless you fall into one of the following three camps:

• you don't believe your moral system is just enough to actually live by for some reason (in which case i'm unsure why you'd confidently assert moral positions);
• you don't actually and fully believe what you're saying (self explanatory), or;
• you would sooner prioritize your personal comfort over the inconvenient outcomes that actually living your moral system invites (which i would consider immoral, especially in this case)

If we know, as we do, that Biden will continue to support Israel’s genocide, and still vote for him, how can we un-hypocritically fault anyone else who supports a genocidal leader so long as they can claim some other worse person waiting in the wings?

i think this is already addressed in my comment: even if you don't vote for Biden, you are complicit by virtue of paying taxes. the Palestinian children we're murdering probably don't care very much if you do or don't vote, given that your vote is largely meaningless in what we do--your taxes are another matter, and directly finance our shipments of aid and weapons to Israel. accordingly i consider taxes to be a far more active contribution than any vote can be in this space, and i think if everybody was truly principled on this matter they would also abstain from paying them. since they don't, i think they've already made such a moral compromise that it would be very silly to impugn voting for Biden.

given the exceptional civility of pretty much everyone else here versus the civility of your two comments, i'm going to have to ask you to take it down a notch. it's fine if you don't find these arguments convincing at all but the idea that they're being made by an "uninformed bad faith actor" is not credible. t3rmit3 has been pretty straightforward and honest in their convictions here.

i think this thread is already trending in a poor in terms of actually, productively discussing this pretty serious event—and, speaking in a moderator capacity, i would also strongly prefer a direct journalistic source on that event to a second-hand source like this youtube video. so, fair warning to all participants: if this thread continues to go poorly i'll likely remove it and start a fresh thread myself.

What has me considering the deontological position on this specifically is that, for utilitarian purposes, I have voted to allow our entire federal government to continue to drift right. When choosing the lesser of the two evils every time I did, I think I failed to consider that my permissiveness would embolden the lesser of the two evils to become increasingly evil as they were aware I wasn’t voting for them but against their opponent.

i guess my problem is, if you acknowledge this possibility: does it not logically follow that, likewise, allowing someone running as an open fascist to win might have the same or worse impact as you're trying to avoid? because i would personally consider the argument "if Trump wins, fascism will be given a greenlight" more likely than the argument "if Biden wins, genocide will be given a greenlight" for a variety of reasons, and i would consider it more harmful if it occurred too. that's for a few reasons: the overall shift in the party has been to the left and i think that's far more likely to continue than a shift to the right; there's a flourishing left-critical tendency within the Democratic Party; the overall American left the strongest it's been in a long time, etc.

but i think most immediately it's because i would contest the logical validity of the second argument at all. the contemporary US is a post settler-colonial society and most of its land area was acquired through genocidal processes given sanctity by the legal system. to me Biden is neither establishing a new norm nor deviating from an old one—he's just a part of a long-normalized string of presidents like this.[^{1] in my mind trying to break the cycle by punishing him might be cathartic but will be politically fruitless and unlikely to produce the introspection you're seeking. by contrast: i would argue we have not really had a *fascist* president—authoritarian, racist, white supremacist, truly evil? probably yes, but not *fascist*[}2]—and so Trump winning would be a catastrophic normalization of that political tendency which we've to this point avoided. it would have extreme ramifications both domestically and globally, especially for the left.

and i will reiterate that i believe it entirely likely that you're going to get a larger, more sweeping genocide from Trump and his followers than is happening in Palestine if he is given the power to do that. (it's also obvious he's going to continue that one based on his positioning since October 7.) we're already seeing efforts in places like Arizona to make it de facto legal to murder undesirables like undocumented immigrants--the dehumanization needed for widespread killing to begin is clearly high in some parts of the Republican Party. in all of this space, i just don't see very many compelling arguments for why the utilitarian perspective of harm reduction should be discarded here.

[^{1]: indeed i think you could charge nearly every president since the US's inception as being complicit in or directly responsible for at least one genocide. [}2]: i also have a hard time fitting most contemporary presidents into these categories in terms of governance even though i think these descriptors are accurate for most of them. i think Reagan is probably the most explicit offender in this regard, but even so i think it's obvious there is a lot of distance in outcome between how he governed and how Trump has/wants to.

What is your annual income at the moment and do you think you can transition to your own 501c3 in a reasonable time frame.

speaking personally: no, probably not. there are a lot of hurdles we'd have with trying that even in non-rushed circumstances. separately i think it's unlikely an arrangement of this sort would work. over the past 5 months we've averaged about $415/mo after expenses, which works out to around $5,000 a year. taking contributions before expenses this is probably closer to $7,200 or more over a given 12 month interval.

in my mind voting in our current system is just pretty straightforward utilitarian calculus (and can't be anything else): you should vote for the option which will do the least harm and has the highest probability of winning. even if you, say, accept that Biden and Trump are equal on I/P, that just means you should look to other issues on which they are distinct--and they are distinct on basically every other issue in a way that clearly suggests Biden to be the best choice you can make here.

take just the Autocracy Tracker, which makes it unambiguous that Trump, if he wins, is planning a sweeping authoritarian wave of deportations, purges, restrictions of civil rights, and repression of minority groups and ideological groups he disagrees with. much of this is, in a sense, already happening here and already a form of genocide against some groups (trans people most prominently--it is now de facto illegal to be trans and legal to bring harm to trans people in large portions of the US). a Trump win will probably ensure there is no safe place for such groups in this country anymore.

on a moral level: i am just not sympathetic to the idea that voting for Biden constitutes blood on your hands in a meaningful way. i think if you accept this line of argumentation, you would ultimately have to bite the bullet that this could also be said of paying taxes[^1]--and i certainly don't begrudge people for paying their taxes even as this lines the pocket of the war machine, so then why should judge them for voting? in general: by virtue of existing within a state, you will always be complicit to some degree in the crimes of that state, regardless of what you do to extricate yourself from supporting them. so i just don't think that abstention from voting or voting for a more morally defensible alternative actually cleans your hands of the blood being perceived here.

separately, and more pragmatically: there is no compelling third party with anywhere near a possibility of winning or even scoring a "symbolic victory." a vote for a leftist third party right now is, in a real sense, a vote wasted--because these parties are incompetent, fractured, and full of people who are not serious candidates. even with the Green Party (by far the most electorally advanced of them) nobody has ever trembled at their influence and in practice they mostly seem to exist to waste a lot of the money given to them on quixotic presidential candidates. imo: any actual movement challenging the power--your DSAs, for example--is going to be built from the ground up and not imposed through the presidency, and is only going to use electoralism as one of its several political arms.

[^1]: arguably, it's even more true of paying taxes than of voting: votes may make no difference in whether something happens or not, but taxes actively make them possible

yeah, we're vaguely aware of some of these. hopefully, when we reach out to OCF they'll be able to hand us off to one of them or something like that--but obviously, it's a good idea to have a backup plan, and you don't just want to have the single basket of eggs after the rug gets pulled out from under you like this

today is apparently just a bloodbath day in gaming generally. Deck Nine is also laying 20% of its staff off, and esports company ESL Faceit Group is laying off 15%

technofetishism--if there's anything local politicians love it's sounding hip and getting Cool Headlines over boring but practical technology that actually works

according to Jason Schreier:

PlayStation plans to close its London studio, which was responsible for several recent VR games.

Among other divisions, the layoffs will hit Insomniac (Spider-Man), Naughty Dog (The Last of Us), and Guerrilla (Horizon), three of PlayStation's most successful subsidiaries

actually, i guess i should say that some corporations get a carve-out here, since worker co-operatives also fall under the banner—i think you can trust most worker co-ops to serve your interests in principle when you interact with them. but i would otherwise sustain that yeah, you should just be adversarial with corporations and assume that what they're doing is ultimately intended to fuck you, nickle-and-dime you, or just generally treat you like dirt. i'm just not sure why a corporation like Wendy's should ever get your benefit of the doubt or presumption of acting in your interests as a customer, ultimately.

Sure, but nothing I wrote above depends on trust.

the premise of a "win-win-win" scenario is necessarily predicated on the belief that a corporation would ever let such an arrangement occur versus just shamelessly exploiting its customers and telling them to love it or leave it, which is a form of trust. in my mind that is trust that is severely unearned by literally any current corporation—and i would firmly assert that even outside of a vacuum the vast majority of corporations will gladly tell (and right now are in the process of telling) their customers the latter

I think this could be good.

on principle i will never trust any corporation to do good things unless compelled to by a higher power such as the state, and i certainly do not trust them to do good things when the corporate-speak being used to describe those things is "enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling." reeks of grift

i literally cannot think of a pricing model i want less for a restaurant i might conceivably patronize than this

i think this is a very good illustration of how better things are legitimately possible, even in America where the infrastructure can be truly doom-inspiring.

this is definitely undesirable in a number of contexts, but as far as we're aware this is a Lemmy thing we can't change and don't really have control over.

One might find disappointing the disjunction between UATX’s tantalizing marketing and its conceptual yields. UATX had tweeted, “Dare to think with us,” had promised that they were “Not your typical summer school…,” had titled their program “Forbidden Courses.” But what was aired in this particular Forbidden Course were opinions neither audacious nor surprising. They were platitudes about the nature of man and woman, of the kind encountered in bad romantic comedies produced in the aughts. “Women are more complicated than men.” “There are things that women want that they don’t like that they want.” “With boys, their bodies and their desires are one.”

it's... incredible how not-transgressive and not-marginal these opinions are

the opinion here is just a little bit theocratic